Ruth was selected from hundreds of applicants to speak at the event which had a 20% speaker acceptance rate running a session which encouraged students to get involved in contributing to open source projects during their studies. She also held several one to one mentoring sessions during the event and helped to staff a booth in the careers fair.

Ruth explains “Open Source is a real passion of mine, it empowers people all over the world to make great things happen, to earn a living, to improve the lives of others. I’ve been part of the Joomla Project since 2008 and have served on the Leadership Team for nearly two years. In that time I’ve really appreciated how welcoming the project is to women, and I was delighted to be able to represent the project at the prestigious Grace Hopper Event”.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing smashed all previous records this year, almost doubling its attendance figures to 8,000 delegates – most of whom were female students of computing, technology and related subjects -in 2014. Attracting keynotes including the newly appointed CTO of the United States of America Megan Smith, MIT professor Shafi Goldwasser, Director of Defense Advanced Research Projects Arati Prabhakar and Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, the event was a huge success in every way.

The Joomla project was proud to be a silver sponsor, hosting a booth in the careers fair and encouraging hundreds of women to make their first contributions to an open source project.